Significance

Implementation of Formulae for estimating significance of event counts wrt a prediction with or without uncertainty

Setting up the code

The recommended way to use this code is with one of the StatAnalysis releases where this package comes precompiled. Just setup like this:

asetup StatAnalysis,<version>

where <version> is e.g. 0.0.2.

compile from source

Alternatively you can compile from source if you have a ROOT build available. You can either take the header and source files and compile it yourself, or use the provided CMakeLists.txt to compile and install like so:

mkdir build; cd build
cmake ../
make install

A library will be built in the build directory, which you can incorporate into your projects. By installing the library with the above target you can also use the code from the ROOT prompt.

Using the code

The code can be used from the ROOT prompt or in ROOT macros with:

double n = 4; double predicted = 3; double uncert = 0.2;
Significance::Recommended(n, predicted, uncert);

Similarly, the code can be used from python with PyROOT:

import ROOT
ROOT.Significance.Recommended(4,3,0.2)

Other formulae for significance

The code includes implementations of all the significance formulae that were investigated. The recommended method is accessed by the Recommended method, other methods can be accessed for curious developers by looking at the header.